NEW DELHI: Social media is fast becoming a popular platform for the communications and IT ministry to fix consumer complaints from across the country. The ministry has redressed about 200 complaints till now, as per official data. Until December the minister's office had forwarded 136 complaints received through social media to different departments for action. Of these 92 cases were successfully redressed.

The state run-BSNL separately received 326 cases, of which 111 cases had been resolved. "This is part of digitising India. For digital revolution to trickle down to grass-roots level, citizens' complaints from any corner of the country, especially remote, must be redressed immediately and promptly," communications and IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad told ET.

A small team in the minister's office attends to any specific complaint posted by citizens on his Facebook and Twitter accounts. Every complaint that the officers find tangible and specific is forwarded to the department concerned in writing and a time frame is given for attending to that complaint. The minister's personal staff monitors this redressal mechanism and delay in redressing public grievances beyond the stipulated time frame is taken very seriously, officials said.

"Unlike the conventional channels of public grievance redressal, the advantage of using social media is that it enhances transparency and accountability of the organisation," Prasad said. This is so because when an aggrieved citizen writes on an open platform like Facebook and Twitter, the world gets to read about his problem, officials said.

The problem, its redressal and the time frame for fixing it all are under public scrutiny, helping the government perform in a transparent manner, said an officer who is part of the team that monitors complaints. Citing an example of the process of handling complaints, an official said Bikas Swain, a resident of Jharkhand, had posted a picture of a dilapidated letter box in Dhanbad on the minister's Twitter account.

In less than a week, the letter box was restored. "The minister thanked Bikas Swain for acting like aresponsible citizen and shared the photo of the restored letter box through Twitter," the official said.